Exploring the influence of city design on sales volume

What is it about?

The design of cities has a lot to do with how people behave in them - for example, dense cities have more businesses in a smaller area, which means that people are more likely to walk rather than drive. This paper looks at whether or not different aspects of walkable city design - like density - have an impact on the sales performance of individual businesses, comparing Phoenix and Boston. We build a statistical model to piece out how much of a business' sales volume is due to characteristics of the business itself (things like how well it is managed, what type of product it sells, etc.) vs. physical characteristics of the neighborhood it is located in (things like density, block length, and transit accessibility). In the end, we find that these physical characteristics do have a small but significant impact on business sales volume in both cities, but the specific things that significantly impact sales in Boston are much different than those in Phoenix.

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Why is it important?

There is relatively little work on the impact of the built environment on sales volume, and our results show that in both cities, physical characteristics of the neighborhood do play a small but significant role in determine business sales volume. However, it is important to note that the relationship between individual features of the built environment and sales volume varies considerably by city - there is no "one size fits all" approach.